by R. N. Morris
‘I am a sanitary inspector. The summer is a very busy time. The cholera, you understand.’
‘How interesting!’ Porfiry’s gaze became almost devouring as he looked at Meyer. He nodded thoughtfully a couple of times. ‘You know, we have a public health problem at the bureau. The Yekaterininsky Canal is a disgrace. The water is running with human excrement. You can imagine the stench. And the flies. I have been trying to get one of you chaps to come over and inspect it for weeks. I wrote a letter. Nothing was done. I was not even granted the courtesy of a reply.’
‘Do you know how many sanitary inspectors there are in St Petersburg?’
Porfiry shook his head and frowned, sensing the gist of what was coming.
‘Six. If you arrest me it will be five.’
‘What makes you think I want to arrest you?’
‘Oh come now. I know the way you policemen’s minds work.’
‘I’m not a policeman, Dr Meyer. I am a magistrate.’
‘Even so.’
‘I will not be arresting anyone until I have determined what killed your wife and son. That will require a medical examination of the bodies. I will have this remaining chocolate analysed too, of course. As well as samples of everything else Raisa and Grisha ate today. But tell me, as a doctor, what do you make of their symptoms? The vomiting? I believe there was loss of bowel control too. Did you notice the eyes? The pupils, dilated. And, of course, the sudden and painful death. Do you recognise here the pathology of any natural disease?’
Dr Meyer’s expression was stripped of hope. He surveyed the veranda with an appalled gaze. ‘No.’
‘So what, Dr Meyer, in your opinion, could have killed them?’
‘A toxic agent of some kind. That is to say, poison. And judging by the violence of their reaction to it, I would have to say a particularly virulent agent. Probably an alkaloid. Aconite, for example.’
‘Aconite? An interesting suggestion. As far as I know, there is no reliable test for it.’
‘It is impossible to detect. However, its presence can be inferred, if other poisons are ruled out.’
‘It is part of your job, as a sanitary inspector, to be well-versed in toxic materials, I imagine?’
‘There is some call for expertise in that field.’
‘And access too? I am thinking of the control of pests.’
‘It is true. I know where to lay my hands on certain substances not generally accessible to the public.’
‘Thank you. You have been most helpful.’
‘Are you sure? I mean to say, have I incriminated myself enough?’ A snarling leer disfigured Meyer’s face, from which strained high-pitched laughter was expelled, as if under pressure.
‘Is there anything else you would like to add?’ asked Porfiry, smiling with uncomfortable amusement.
‘Perhaps you would consider it relevant that I took my PhD in toxicology?’
‘I shall make a note of it.’ Porfiry bowed politely, and began to feel the need for a long-deferred cigarette.
4
Examination and elimination
The room was in the basement of the Shestaya Street police station: whitewashed brick walls, no windows, the light instead provided by a series of oil lamps hanging from a beam across the ceiling. Stacked on a pallet in the corner were barrels of ice hacked from the Neva in the winter, covered in a tarpaulin. The ice was there to keep the temperature down. It is occasionally useful, in a police station, to have a cold room on hand in the height of summer, for certain aspects of investigative work. However, Porfiry had the impression that the air would have been just as chill without the ice.
The bodies were laid out side by side on a broad table in the centre, beneath the lamps. A doctor who had been called in from the Military Hospital in the Vyborg district was stooped over the first of them, that of Raisa Ivanovna. He was absorbed in the task of cutting away the clothing with shears. The two official witnesses stood to one side, watching with expressions of rebuked awe. Retired civil servants of vertiginous rank, they had entered the room medals first, talking loudly and self-importantly about past glories and mutual acquaintances. But a stern glance from the surgeon, who had been waiting impatiently for their arrival with implements in hand, silenced them. This doctor, one Feuerbach, a German like Meyer judging by his name, was a taciturn but efficient technician. The air in the room was chastening, too. Despite the temperature, there was a faecal ripeness to it, which outdid anything the Ditch could muster.
The corset snapped apart. The dead woman’s flesh sprang out and absorbed the glare of the oil lamps with a sullen coveting.
Porfiry gave a pained wince. He cast an absent-minded glance at Virginsky, as if he regarded the young man as an irksome responsibility he believed he had shaken off. He had a vague sense that he owed him some kind of explanation.
The doctor continued to work away methodically at the clothes. It was when the cadaver was finally stripped bare, the layers of clothing splayed around it, that Porfiry felt the strongest inclination to turn to Virginsky. For now, he resisted.
The skin was smooth and bloated, the colour of grubby linen. He could not help assessing the shape of her body, in a way that appalled him, even as he did it. He tried instead to imagine how she must have felt about her body. She would not have been happy with it, he believed. Or perhaps that was a presumption on his part. Looking down at the amorphous spread of her trunk, the bulges of her abdomen, the two swollen capsules of her thighs, which were smeared with the soiling of her last evacuation, he had more the sense that she did not care about any of it. Her physical form, even perhaps her physical existence, was almost a matter of indifference to her. If this were so, he wondered when and how it had come about. Her face, he felt, had the potential to be counted beautiful. But if happiness and goodness are necessary elements of beauty, he wondered if he would have found them on her living features.
The doctor examined the surface of the body and made notes in silence. His scrutiny was almost unseemly in its scientific rigour. Porfiry knew that it was necessary, but he could not help feeling a proxy outrage at the way the man laid claim to the flesh with probing gaze and fingers. She was exposed, but no longer vulnerable. A doctor who deals in the dead has no need to make his touch gentle, or his manner deferential; the normal proprieties can be dispensed with. Porfiry sensed a shifting of discontent from the others watching. He remembered Virginsky, and at last half-turned in his direction.
He took in the complexity of Virginsky’s expression immediately: his mouth rose at one side, as if in a snarl, or in preparation for a cry of protest; but his eyes were rapt. Porfiry recognised the appetite in those eyes. Virginsky was in his early twenties, and yet the knowledge of death and evil was already there in him. Porfiry knew that once that knowledge has been awoken, there is no going back. The witnessing of one horror can produce a taste for more.
There was a relaxation in Virginsky’s face. Porfiry looked back to the examination table. The doctor had made the first incision, the right arm of a Y that began at the collarbone.
‘It is the contents of the stomach that we are particularly interested in,’ Porfiry said, feeling the redundancy of his words. The doctor said nothing, barely nodded an acknowledgement.
And now it began. The final conversion of Raisa Ivanovna Meyer from a human being to an assemblage of matter. It was not enough to strip away her clothes, her skin had to be removed, in an exposure beyond nakedness. There was no howl of pain or protest, just the soft, adhering sounds of a body unravelling.
Porfiry looked again at Virginsky, whose head was now rocking in a compulsive nod. He touched the younger man’s shoulder. Virginsky met his eye with startled resentment. He looked down at the hand on his shoulder as if that were more repulsive than the spectacle on the table. Porfiry removed it. Virginsky had stopped nodding.
If Porfiry was only interested in the stomach, Dr Feuerbach showed an admirable impartiality towards all the internal organs, each of which he held up
as if it was a trophy won from bloody battle, before handing it to his Diener for weighing. The stench from the body increased with each unpacking.
‘Here is your stomach,’ he said at last, holding the loose livid sac, its breaches secured with metal clips, towards Porfiry.
Porfiry raised a hand in demurral. ‘Would you be so good as to decant the contents into a bottle? And do the same with the other stomach. Then, if you please, have them delivered to Dr Pervoyedov of the Obukhovsky Hospital. He is currently analysing the food samples and vomit taken from the Meyers’ dacha.’
Dr Feuerbach’s brows clenched in a bemused frown, which somehow conveyed that this was the most ridiculous and incomprehensiblesuggestion he had ever heard. He turned his back on Porfiry with a shrug and barked commands at his Diener in German.
In his laboratory at the Obukhovsky Hospital, Dr Pervoyedov held a magnifying glass to a chocolate. The chocolate, which was by now losing its smooth, spherical perfection, was placed on a circle of filter paper. If he needed to move the sweet, he would handle it only with tongs. For one thing, he didn’t want the heat of his fingers to accelerate its melting. He was also aware that certain poisons can be absorbed through the skin. Until he had determined what had killed Raisa Ivanovna Meyer and her son, he would take every precaution.
At the other end of the long table, two dozen white mice huddled and shivered in their cages. Occasionally one would break free to scurry and defecate in the sawdust, the sudden motion causing the bars to rattle and sing.
Through the lens, beads of fatty sweat stood out on a surface of tiny pits and pores. He held the point of a scalpel to each of these imperfections in turn, trying to get some sense of their scale. There was one point in particular where the chocolate dipped sharply, although when he looked at it without the magnifying glass the dip disappeared. Dr Pervoyedov located it again and pushed his scalpel into it. He then cut in the opposite direction.
The cream of the filling was pale brown, except for one area, now revealed in both sections of the chocolate, where a white powdery deposit, like the tail of a comet, could be seen. It was possible these were un-dissolved sugar particles; it was equally possible they were something else. He scooped some of the substance on to the end of his scalpel, which he dipped into a flask of distilled water. He allowed the extracted sample to dissolve, stirring the water with a glass rod. Finally he drew some of the water off with a pipette and pumped it into a feeding bottle, which he exchanged for the bottle on one of the cages.
The movement of his hand, and the noise of the metal clip as he put the water bottle in place, startled the mice into a mass convulsion. He saw the tiny rodents as bundles of living matter, life reduced to one of its purest and most meaningless forms. For what does a mouse live? he thought. Only for life itself.
But they were such timid creatures, shivering even in the heat of summer, dropping black slugs of faeces at the slightest disturbance of their precarious and reduced world. Even had these mice been in the wild, they would live out their lives in a narrow pattern of behaviour circumscribed by their habits and instincts, under the constant shadow of fear and more often than not racked by the ache of hunger. They reminded him of those peasants who never leave their village, not because they are forbidden by lack of passport, but because it would never occur to them to do so.
And yet this was life. He would even say it was one of the higher forms of life, compared with the twitching, seething organisms he saw under his microscope.
He did not do so now, but he had handled these mice many times. As he watched them, he cupped his hands and felt the remembered spasms of their weightless bodies, the sharpness of their fine claws against his skin, the nip of their teeth. He would always handle them reverently. He felt himself to be handling particles of life itself. The life force, the only thing he was capable of worshipping, pulsated in their fur and fear.
He watched as one of the mice came to sip at the water bottle. It moved away and cleaned its whiskers in a mechanistic reflex. Almost immediately, it returned to the water bottle for a second drink. No doubt it was the sugar in the water that drew it back. Again, this was followed by a burst of cleaning activity, more energetic and extended than the first, Pervoyedov judged. It was enough of a variation from the norm to pique his interest. Pervoyedov leant forward. As if in response, the mouse reared up on its hind legs and opened its mouth in a silent cry. Its pink eyes stood out wildly as it stretched its neck and rotated its head. He saw its throat go into spasm as the breaths came fast and sharp. Now the animal scrubbed at the side of its snout in what seemed like a desperate effort to remove its own face. It finally tucked its head down under its belly, so extremely that it flipped over on its back. The mouse quickly righted itself and began chasing its tail. Then it ran blindly into the side of the cage. After that it began to gnaw at its own forelimbs, drawing blood almost immediately. The mouse fell on to its side, though its legs continued moving, as if it believed it was still running. Before long, these movements became convulsive. There was a final shudder, then the creature was still.
Porfiry let out a small groan of dismay as he entered his chambers. The temperature was perhaps a degree or two higher than previous days, and the stench of sewage was more pungent than ever. The room gave him nothing to breathe. He felt immediately exhausted and nauseous. He swatted a hand vaguely, prompted by the enquiring buzz of a bluebottle circling his head. He saw it fly in an erratic swooping zigzag over to the window, where it rattled uselessly after hitting the glass with an audible pop.
Virginsky followed him in. ‘Shall I open a window, Porfiry Petrovich?’
‘Yes, yes. See if you can get rid of that fly.’ Porfiry took a seat behind his desk, then immediately stood up, pushing the chair away impatiently. In front of him was a large yellow envelope with his name handwritten on it. Porfiry lit a cigarette before turning his attention to it.
Virginsky opened the window to release the fly. The atmosphere in the room worsened perceptibly.
‘Close it!’ cried Porfiry. He took out a sheaf of official form papers clipped together, which he recognised as a medical examiner’s report. A small note, the handwriting matching that of the envelope, fell out with them.
His Excellency, The Honoured and Esteemed Magistrate Porfiry Petrovich,
Allow me to present for your attention my findings regarding the substances that you had delivered to me for analysis. As you will see from the document enclosed, it is impossible to identify with absolute certainty the toxic agent responsible for killing the two bodies examined by my esteemed colleague Dr Feuerbach, although a number of candidate substances for which there are currently reliable tests, to wit, arsenic, prussic acid, etc., have been eliminated. However, it has been possible to establish the method of administration of the toxic agent. A small quantity taken from the remaining Ballet’s chocolate induced death in a sample of mice; the peculiar symptoms suffered by these mice were replicated in other test groups when distillations taken from the victims’ stomach contents were administered. The same results were achieved with distillations from the vomit recovered from the scene of death. In the interests of providing a juridically acceptable identification, by means of experimentation rather than analysis, a number of known poisons were then administered to further samples of mice, and the reactions monitored. One substance produced manifestations which corresponded exactly to the results provided by the remaining Ballet’s chocolate, stomach contents and vomit: aconite. It is the opinion, therefore, of this medical examiner that the deaths of Raisa Ivanovna Meyer and Grigory Martinovich Meyer were caused by aconite poisoning, administered by means of a contaminated box of chocolates. The full scientific reasons for this opinion are given in the enclosed report.
I would like, if I may, to add one personal note. I have known Martin Meyer for a number of years, both in a professional and personal capacity. I will only say that I do not believe him capable of murdering his wife and son. This belief, and indeed my declared ass
ociation with Martin Meyer, is not pertinent to my medical opinion, and should have no bearing on it.
Your humble servant,
Dr P. P. Pervoyedov.
‘The idiot!’ Porfiry threw the letter down, disturbing two flies that were crawling on his desk.
Virginsky snatched the note and scanned it.
Still standing over his desk, Porfiry riffled through the pages of the report impatiently. ‘This is useless. A clever defence lawyer will argue it is inadmissible, because of Pervoyedov’s relationship with Meyer.’
‘But I don’t understand. His findings incriminate Meyer,’ said Virginsky as he finished reading. ‘So, as he says, the friendship is irrelevant. It can be disregarded, surely? Or at least separated off. It is perfectly possible, theoretically, that Pervoyedov could appear as an expert witness for the prosecution and a character witness for the defence.’
‘And in which capacity do you think he would be more likely to carry the jury?’
‘It would have been helpful if he had told you, perhaps,’ said Virginsky, returning the note to Porfiry.